By Asa Fitch and Tom Dotan

The Breakthrough

Microsoft researchers say they created a chip that leverages a new state of matter that could underpin quantum computers more powerful than the world has ever seen. The chip employs a so-called "topological superconductor" -- a material that isn't a solid, liquid or gas -- to produce building blocks that can be scaled up into a powerful quantum computer, Microsoft said.

The Impact

The chip, called "Majorana 1," so far is the product of a research effort and isn't for sale. The Microsoft researchers outlined their breakthrough in a paper published in Nature, a leading scientific journal. It is hard to know how central it will be in the development of more powerful quantum computers, but Microsoft and tech peers like IBM and Google are investing heavily in building a practical quantum system.

The Context

Discovering new drugs, securing digital systems and encrypting data are just some of the areas where quantum computers hold promise. They crunch numbers in a fundamentally different way from ordinary computers and can do certain computations orders of magnitude faster. Quantum computing, however, is still in its nascent stages, with few very powerful computers in existence. Industry experts suggest the first commercially viable quantum computers could begin to appear in the next half decade or so.

What's Next

Microsoft said it could scale up the chip it developed so it holds a million quantum bits -- or "qubits" -- but didn't say how long that would take. Competitors, meanwhile, are developing their own quantum computers. Google, for example, announced its own breakthrough in quantum computing in December with a chip it called Willow. The company said the chip was able to perform a calculation in five minutes that a traditional supercomputer would take a near-eternity to do.

Write to Asa Fitch at asa.fitch@wsj.com and Tom Dotan at tom.dotan@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 19, 2025 17:24 ET (22:24 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.